Pages

Monday, July 17, 2017

Top 10 New Species of 2017

Yes, it's only July, but these folks always publish their Top 10 list for the year early (to beat the holiday rush, or something?)The ESF Top 10 list from the International Institute for Species Exploration has something for everyone. There's a spiny ant - and we mean really spiny - christened Pheiodole drogon - yes, for Drogon, the black dragon in Game of Thrones, because the creature's well-defended back looked like the dragon's to the scientist involved. We have a spider with a body shaped like the Hogwarts sorting hat - so here is Eriovixia gryffindori. There's a new katydid with an astonishing resemblance to a leaf. The Sulawesi root rat Gracilimus radix is unique among its kind for enjoying veggies in addition to meat. (Maybe this was the species that showed up in Ratatouille.) A California millipede adapted for an all-liquid diet (I don't want to know what liquids) made the list, which celebrates scientific importance of the species selected rather than size or mass appeal. Potamotrygon rex is a ray from Brazil sporting spectacular yellow or orange sport stretching well over a meter in length and weighing up to 20 kg. Southeast Asia contributes a big (20 cm), poisonous (of course) centipede (as Odgen Nash said, "a bug we do not really need") with amazing swimming and diving abilities: it can walk on the bottom, using stored oxygen. The bush tomato is a spiky little Australian fruit whose name was chosen with input from 150 7-th grade students in Pennsylvania. An orchid from Columbia sports reproductive parts looking like the head of the traditional devil. And Xenoturbella churro is a deep-dwelling marine worm that, to someone who is a very sloppy cook, looks sort of / kind of / approximately like a churro.Bigfoot,is seems, has escaped for another year, but the list is important as a reminder of how many species we have yet to find, and how badly we need to protect them. Several are already in danger.